Month: May 2016

Speaking of James Collinson, some new images have popped up on the web the past few years. The most interesting is a supposed self-portrait and one of his wife Elizabeth. I hope these will be studied for authenticity because we do not have a portrait of Collinson. Jan Marsh mentions one self-portrait made in his youth but I have yet to see a reproduction of this.

James & Eliza CollinsonSisters

Mrs. Ford

Collinson deserves serious study and a catalog raisonne´.

By his subjects and style he is more closely related to Frank Stone and William Powell Frith than the Pre-Raphaelites. His Solice for an Invalid follows in the tradition of Frith’s Sherry, Sir.

Congratulations to JMW Turner for being the face of British visual arts on the new £20 note. The list of nominations was incredibly extensive including over 29,000 visual artists. The short list of five were Turner, filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, painter William Hogarth, and designer Josiah Wedgwood. The new note should go into circulation in 2020. (I can hear Ruskin’s cheers from here!)

If you have seen the film Mr. Turner you might have noticed some familiar paintings. In one of the final scenes he is at the 1851 Royal Academy Exhibition and grunts at Millais’s Woodman’s Daughter and Mariana and Brown’s Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.

Also in the extras of the DVD there is a sequence filmed at Wentworth Woodhouse where the cast are rehearsing a scene to represent a Royal Academy Exhibition at Somerset House. Timothy Spall is shown in front of Turner paintings and to his left is James Collinson’s Mother and Child by a Stile – Isle of Wight. This was painted in 1849 when Collinson and William Michael Rossetti spent the summer at the Isle of Wight. It is his most Pre-Raphaelite landscape.